Hyväksymispäivämäärä

Tiivistelmä

This study explores the ways how the issue of quality is understood in the context of public online services. The study is carried out by the means of a research material that consisted of literature on the quality of public and other types of online services. The aim of the study is to analyse how quality is defined in the online context, how it is characterised in public online services particularly and in online services generally, and how it is perceived within Finnish public online services. As a method of analysis the tools of qualitative and quantitative content analysis were applied.

It was found that the conceptions of online quality are often vague. They resemble the general notions and uses of the concept of quality. The four main approaches made to define online quality stated that quality in an online service is about achieving the goals set for the service, about listening to the users and serving their needs, about fulfilling certain quality requirements, and most distinctively, about realising the potential benefits of the Internet to the user.

The results of the study indicate, moreover, that the themes characterising the conceptions of quality in public online services can be classified into certain categories which are: content, ease of use, accessibility, openness, interactivity, appearance, scope for participation, security and privacy, findability, and service depth. Of these, accessibility, openness, scope for participation, and service depth were typical especially for public online services, whereas the other themes were typically used to characterise also the quality of other types of online services. The view of quality emerging from the material on Finnish public online services was found to be fairly similar to that above. Yet the efforts to accurately define online quality, except for the use of quality themes, were even more remote.

The results of the study present a variety of conceptions that are prevalent for the issue of quality in public online services. They can be utilised in elaborating the discussion around online quality, and in constructing or recognising the conception of quality concerning the online services of a certain service provider.

The quality themes addressed in this study particularly express both the special characters of the Web as a service platform and the special obligations and features of public administration as a service provider. They involve valuable information on the nature of online services that should be acknowledged and applied in the development of public online services intended to be profitable and worth using.